The 6 Stupidest Plots of Supposedly Smart Movie Villains

Movie villains, even the ones portrayed as master criminal geniuses, usually spend the movie making incredibly stupid mistakes (accidental or otherwise). So you can almost make a game out of it: The second time you watch any movie involving a supposed criminal mastermind, just imagine how his plan would have gone had the hero not showed up at all.

Because more often than not, you'll realize that his genius scheme would have fallen apart all on its own. What do we mean? Well...

#6. Die Hard -- Hans Gruber's Escape Plan is Terribly Inadequate

The scheme:

Hans Gruber and his gang of sweater-wearing European dance models lay siege to Nakatomi Plaza, posing as terrorists to conceal their true purpose, which is to steal $640 million in bearer bonds from the building's vault. Once the vault is cracked, Hans plans to send all of the hostages to the roof and blow them up, anticipating that the resulting pile of bodies will be too dense for the authorities to discover that his own corpse isn't among them.

Then, Hans and his gang intend to load the bearer bonds into a fake ambulance, blending into the chaos of emergency vehicles and allowing them to escape undetected.

"I almost brought a school bus, but what idiot would try to flee a robbery in one of those?"

But wait a second ...

Every single step of Hans' escape plan is so terribly flawed that, had Bruce Willis not kicked him through a 40th story window, he and his henchmen would have been arrested before their ambulance even made it to the first stoplight.

First of all, Hans begins the evening with 13 henchmen. Take another look at their escape van:

"Some lap sitting will be necessary."

How the hell is he planning on fitting 13 grown men in that thing? Let alone the stacks of bearer bonds they came to collect, which, we are shown, require several duffel bags and a hand cart to transport:

"Nobody ate this morning, right?"

There's also the matter of actually exiting the parking garage. We see Hans and his men lock the gates, which is what traps Argyle the limo driver inside for the entire movie. Argyle only gets out because he finally decides to crash his limo into one of the exits:

It took him two hours to figure this out.

When the FBI shows up, they cut the power to the building, meaning the electronic gates in the garage are now frozen in place. Hans would have to plow his ambulance through the bars just like Argyle in order to leave, and we're willing to bet one of the 100 or so cops on the scene would notice something like that.

Even if he manages to get out of the building, Hans is far from home free. The whole point of the terrorist song and dance he feeds the FBI is to disguise the fact that he's really just a bank robber. According to his plan, blowing up the roof will lead everyone to believe that he and his extremist buddies detonated themselves and their hostages, because that's the kind of silly bullshit that terrorists do. However, the bomb doesn't destroy the vault, and Hans never intended it to. Meaning he purposely left a giant, empty safe hanging open for the authorities to find.

"... just leave a note saying it was like that when we got here."

It won't take them too long to identify the charred bodies, particularly when they already know exactly how many hostages were in the building. When the FBI realizes their count is short a few terrorists and about half-a-billion dollars, they're going to know that Hans took that fucking money. At best, he's bought himself an extra week, and then Interpol is going to burst into his Majorcan hotel room and drag him out through the lobby in his bathrobe.

The bad guy in Les Miserables is Inspector Javert, played by Russell Crowe. His grand evil scheme, as revealed in song over the course of the film's 26-hour run time, is to embark on an undercover mission to infiltrate a group of student revolutionaries who are in the midst of staging a bloody uprising in Paris.

So, disguised as a 19th century longshoreman for some reason, Russell Crowe joins the rebels and offers to spy on a battalion of government troops assembling in the city. When he returns, he tells them that the soldiers aren't planning to attack that night, which is, of course, a festering pile of duplicitous horseshit. When the soldiers totally do attack that night, he will rejoin with them and take the rebels by surprise, killing anyone who resists and taking the rest to jail.

Russell Crowe's singing, however, is a prison all its own.

But wait a second ...

Crowe/Javert is easily the most feared and recognized lawman in the city, probably in all of France. He can't just pop his collar and throw on a watch cap and tell people his name is Prickly Pierre.

We see Javert on patrol in an earlier scene, strutting through the slums in full uniform and singing about how awesome his job is to anyone within earshot. Dozens of people cower away from him, nervously muttering his name in hushed tones. They clearly know exactly who he is, even though, as you may have noticed, his uniform does not have a name tag. This is way before television and the Internet, so that means Javert has one hell of a reputation.

"What's my name? WHAT'S MY MOTHERFUCKING NAME?"

OK, you say, but maybe Javert knew he was unknown among this particular group of rebellious kids. Nope! Two of the lead revolutionaries, Marius and Eponine, are present during this scene. (Eponine even shouts "It's Javert!" when he arrives.) So it's kind of a miracle his cover isn't blown five seconds after he approaches the rebel barricade.

And the thing is, it isn't even necessary for Javert to be the one to go undercover -- it's a pretty simple assignment. Literally all he does is help them lift a few boards, then says, "I'll go spy on the government" and disappears. Surely this task could have been delegated to someone other than the most famous policeman in France. That's like Robocop putting on heels and trying to stage a prostitution sting.

But Javert does it himself, and, unsurprisingly, he gets recognized the instant one of the rebels gets a good look at his face.

In the first film of the Wesley Snipes kung fu vampire franchise, Deacon Frost, an evil vampire lord that refuses to button his shirt, is a member of the Shadow Council, an ancient group of throat biters who believe that vampires should coexist with humans. However, Frost doesn't agree with that viewpoint, so he launches an evil scheme that involves performing a ritual to turn everyone on Earth into vampires, because Daybreakers hadn't come out yet to show him what a shitty idea that is.

And he looks like a man that knows a thing or two about shitty ideas.

But wait a second ...

If everyone on the planet is a vampire, what the hell are they going to eat?

The film establishes that vampires specifically need human blood to survive, because their own blood can't sustain hemoglobin and no other type of blood is a close enough match. That means they literally can't eat anything else -- they can't feed on each other, and they can't just get a table at Sizzler once there are no more humans around.

The Shadow Council doesn't coexist with humans because centuries of life has turned them into a bunch of peace-loving hippies. They do it because vampires depend on human beings for their very survival, and humans are capable of organizing a substantial resistance. If cows suddenly developed the ability to burst into our homes while we were sleeping and hammer splintery wooden daggers into our chests, we would probably have to negotiate a more careful relationship with them, too.

It's actually just an elaborate scheme to promote veganism.

Also, vampires are immortal. Frost and his henchmen can't treat the issue with an "I'll be dead by then, so who cares?" mentality like global warming or the coming ice age, because they will be around to see it happen. The food supply will gradually decrease as the size of the population remains the same, leaving billions of vampires to die a slow, agonizing death from starvation. You'd think immortals wouldn't have such a short-term view of things.